I shouldn't be alive

In an English café of an Elizabethan theme; tables smelling of forest pine wood, white laced tabletops, porcelain coffee mugs, elaborately crafted metal chairs, I’m having coffee with mom. It’s an open-air café, with the pebbled street under our feet and soft instrumental in the background. As if we were there. In England. Maybe we were.

And this is where the dream starts.


From nowhere, a heavy bearded, red turbaned man comes right next to our table, holding an old, heavy English rifle. His wore a khaki uniform that was crisp and clean. There was a small fixed, fanned cloth on the right of his turban. His pants were ¾ on his legs and the ends were folded in, a little below the knees. There was a lining of thick, black liner on his intrepid eyes. He looked dogged. He positions the rifle and open fires into the front street. “It’s been divided” he says with a malevolent, filthy grin. “The Northerners”.
Just like the movies, just like it, I exhale in and out with whatever air I manage to throw out. We run and find my dad, as the course in any case of an odd dream, and find ourselves into a vast compound of tall, red bricked, rectangular pillars. There was blood. And painful silence.
The best that could be done then was to play dead. So I did. My eyes did not have time to shut and there they were. The turbaned men, into some distance staring, with some foreign tackle. Was I really dead, was the motive.


And that’s when I blinked.